


no pleasures here on earth

by Kyele



Series: i'll fly away [2]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Multi, Nonconsensual outing, Polyamory, Reverse Flash Iris West - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 21:11:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11321826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyele/pseuds/Kyele
Summary: SCANDAL AT STAR LABS, one of the headlines says – one of the more reputable papers, which has a standard to uphold. FAMOUS SCIENTIST REVEALS TASTE FOR ADULTERY, BOYS, THREESOMES, says another, not so restrained. SERVING HIS ASS, a third one proclaims, with a picture of Barry at a crime scene – bending over, of course.Set in an AU where Iris West (still and always played by Candice Patton) is, and has always been, an alternate-Earth bodysnatched version of Eobard Thawne; and in which she, along with a Harrison Wells who is also Eobard Thawne, thoroughly enjoy sharing their Barry Allen between them. Or did, before the prejudice of the 21st century reared its ugly head.





	no pleasures here on earth

**Author's Note:**

> A reminder: this is a fic in which Iris West is, and has always been, a bodysnatched version of Eobard Thawne from another Earth. If that's not your cup of tea, no hard feelings, the back button is in its usual place.
> 
> And a warning, because the tag feels ambiguous to me: This fic contains the forced outing of Barry et al as poly. Read carefully.
> 
> No sex in this one, but all the feels. Turns out this universe has the feels, who knew?

There’s a knock on the door of Eobard’s office at STAR Labs late in the day. “Dr. Wells?” a familiar voice calls.

Eobard’s head comes up. “Yes, Dr. Ramon, come in.”

Enter Cisco Ramon does. “It still feels weird to be called that,” he says, laughing, though the proud smile on his face somewhat belies his words.

“You worked very hard for it, _Doctor_ Ramon,” Eobard smiles. “And the quality of your work here at STAR Labs varied not a jot, even while you were knee-deep in your dissertation defense. I hope you’re proud of yourself.” He pauses, just for a moment. “I’m certainly proud of you.”

Cisco’s smile broadens. “Thank you, Dr. Wells, that means a lot.”

Another moment, then: “And what do you have there for me?” Eobard gestures towards the tablet in Cisco’s hands.

“Right! This is the proposed list of experiments for the particle accelerator for the next month.” Cisco hands this over with some ceremony, which gives Eobard the clue.

“One of yours in here, perhaps?”

Cisco ducks his head and nods. “Two,” he says. “Or, well, one and a half? One is all mine, one is mine and Hart’s.”

“I see,” Eobard murmurs, scrolling down the list and flagging the ones with _Ramon_ and _Ramon, Rathaway_ next to them under _Contributors_. “I’m sure they’ll be green-lit.”

“Thank you, Dr. Wells,” Cisco says happily.

Eobard looks back up and, in doing so, catches a glimpse of the clock. This must be the last thing Cisco is doing before he leaves for the day; Eobard ought not to keep him. “And thank you for bringing this by. Have a good evening, Dr. Ramon.”

“You too!” Cisco gives Eobard something between a nod and an awkward bow, and vanishes as fast as he’d come.

When he’s gone, Eobard regretfully sets the tablet aside. He’d like to look at the details of all the proposed experiments, review them against his own goals and arrange the schedule accordingly. It would be a simple enough constraint satisfaction problem from a computer’s point of view, and Eobard could let Gideon handle it, but Eobard likes doing it himself, when he has the time. It’s just the sort of puzzle he enjoys. Tonight, however, he’s buried in a private research project of his own, and it’s reached a delicate stage. The particle accelerator schedule will wait.

Hours slip by, and Eobard loses himself in his work. The best part about owning his own lab is the ability to act like a grad student again – working at all hours of the day and night, letting his creativity take flight, unencumbered by the need to worry about funding and revenue and customer satisfaction. Of course, it helps that Eobard is now entirely self-funded and rich enough to build ten particle accelerators. He eats considerably less ramen than he had as a graduate student. And enjoys considerably more of the finer things in life.

He also has someone to go home to. Someone real, and not simply the conjured wisps of imagination clothing an idol composited from plaques in a museum and a series of films flickering on an old two-dee projection screen. Many nights, that someone lures Eobard away from STAR Labs. But tonight science calls him, and Eobard gives himself up to the call gladly.

“Excuse me, Professor,” Gideon says unexpectedly.

“What is it, Gideon?” Eobard’s still lost in the problem in front of him, not giving her his full attention. “Is something wrong with the chronon calculations?”

“No, Professor,” she says. “But the news monitoring service has returned a troubling result.”

Eobard looks up. Equations appear behind his eyelids when he blinks. There’s light outside his windows, and the noise outside means – he glances at the clock. Midmorning. He’s worked through the night.

“Did Barry program another eat-something-before-you-pass-out alarm?” Eobard asks wryly. Then what Gideon had said catches up to him. “Wait, the _news_ monitoring service?” The news monitoring service runs all the time, one of Gideon’s eternal processes, but set at such a low priority that the only thing that should lead Gideon to disturb Eobard mid-science are…

Eobard starts out of his chair.

* * *

Minutes later - he’d run - Eobard is back at his house in the woods, staring at a wall full of holographic newspaper projections.

“How did this happen?” he demands.

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” Iris West-Allen says grimly. She rakes a hand through her hair, grimacing as it gets caught in her tangles. She’d run home, too. She _never_ runs. Not anymore. Her hairstyle reflects that; it’s not designed for high speed. Now it’s a tangled mess.

The headlines before them aren’t about world news or politics or even science. They’re from the back of the respectable papers, or else the lurid screams of tabloids. Items that neither of them would ordinarily read; items that neither of them would ordinarily remember _exist_.

But the headlines are about them now. _SCANDAL AT STAR LABS,_ one of them says – one of the more reputable papers, which has a standard to uphold. _FAMOUS SCIENTIST REVEALS TASTE FOR ADULTERY, BOYS, THREESOMES,_ says another, not so restrained. _SERVING HIS ASS,_ a third one proclaims, with a picture of Barry at a crime scene – bending over, of course. Eobard sees red lightning and takes a deep breath, calming himself.

Iris spins away and puts her fist through a wall. She doesn’t make a sound. Lightning crackles around her wrist as she slowly withdraws it. The wall doesn’t have a mark on it.

The sound of the door opening refocuses them both. “Barry?” Eobard calls.

It _is_ Barry, home early from the CCPD, shaking and upset. Too upset to say anything at first. Eobard takes his briefcase, Iris his shoes. They put him on the sofa with a blanket over his lap and a cup of cocoa in his hands. Barry looks at the cocoa, then sets it down and holds out his hands wordlessly until his Reverses come and sandwich him between them.

Only then does he manage to speak. “Singh told me to come home,” Barry whispers. “I didn’t want to come, there were three analyses running in the lab still, I thought I could hide out there, but Singh said that as long as I was there reporters would keep trying to get in. He said – he wanted me to take an escort just to walk to my car.”

“I didn’t hear your car in the driveway,” Eobard observes.

“I left it there. I ran home,” Barry confesses shamefacedly. “I just couldn’t – what if someone had followed me to it? Or tried to block me in? Follow me here? I didn't want to be trapped, and I didn’t want anyone to follow me back here, either.”

“It’s all right,” Iris says. “I ran home too.”

“Oh, Iris,” Barry whispers, kissing her.

It takes half an hour of physical contact, kisses included, before Barry is calm enough to be left even briefly. Iris escapes first, without saying a word; Eobard, similarly silent, lets her go. Seeing Barry like this recalls old, terrible memories for her, of the Armageddon that had claimed her Earth and her Flash along with it, driven her to run here, to change as much about herself as possible in an effort to escape. So Iris goes at the first opportunity. Eobard keeps Barry tucked tight against his body, stroking his hair absently until Barry’s breaths evens out and he slips into a doze.

That settled, Eobard eases him down, fetching a pillow from the bed for Barry’s head and tucking the blanket more firmly around him. Then Eobard goes into the kitchen and pours two healthy measures of scotch. One is for himself. The other, of course, is for Iris, and he carries it out to where she's sitting out the patio.

"Here," he says, handing it to her. He takes a seat in the lounger next to hers and sips his liquor. Out of the corner of his eye he sees her do the same. Then there's silence, broken only by the occasional crackle from the fire she's lit.

Eobard lets it go for a few moments before setting his scotch to the side and sitting forward. "What are you thinking about?"

Iris is still holding her scotch; she takes another sip, the movements somehow vicious. "I'm trying to convince myself that killing the entire reporting staff in Central City won't help."

"I thought you gave up killing for Lent." It's a bad joke, but a true sentiment. Barry hasn't set many conditions on their relationship – he isn't in that position, nor does he truly wish to be – but this had been one of them, before he'd been willing to marry Iris. No more killing.

She'd agreed. Eobard has no such restriction, and part of Iris' acceptance had been because she'd known that Eobard - her doppelgänger from this Earth, despite their wildly varying bodies - would take care of any necessary killing that might come along. The other part of that had been the belief, perhaps false, that killing would rarely if ever be necessary again. With Iris' foreknowledge as their aid, the three of them and their allies have long since defeated the menace that had destroyed Iris' original Earth. Since then there's been peace – the kind of peace enabled by the very public devastation the Reverses had proven themselves capable of, tempered by the benevolent hand of the Flash.

The Justice League wouldn't approve, but it will be another two centuries before Barry gets it into his head to found _them_. In the meanwhile, Barry spends his evenings nabbing robbers and domestic abusers, and his nights pleasing his Reverses. Who, in turn, spend their days making the world a better place in the ways they each have chosen. It’s a wonderful arrangement.

It _has been_ a wonderful arrangement.

“When I promised Barry I wouldn’t kill anymore, I made one very specific exception,” is what Iris says next. There’s a growl in her voice that’s one step down from speed force vibration, and even in the red light cast by the fire Eobard can see her fingers, where they press against the glass of scotch, are turning white.

“His defense,” Eobard says, knowing without needing to be told what Iris’ exception would be. “Barry’s not in any physical danger.”

“Are you sure? _Can_ you be sure? Right now they’re content to assassinate his character, but who knows where they’ll go next.”

Eobard picks his own scotch back up. Takes a sip. Says, seemingly casually: “You never told me what happened to the Flash on your Earth. Before you came here.”

Iris doesn’t flinch. Rather, she turns to stone. “I don’t think I ever will.”

Eobard nods. He watches the fire for a few minutes, studying the leaping of the flames.

“I was there when he died,” Iris whispers. Eobard doesn’t move. Doesn’t turn his head; barely breathes. “They killed him while I watched, and he – he looked at me, the entire time. Because he thought I would do something. Thought I _could_ do something. I’m the Reverse Flash, aren’t I? The powerful one. The one who sees the future, the one who’s willing to do anything – of course there was something I could do, something I’d saved for that moment, made in advance and kept hidden so that when the end came and I could save nothing else I could still save my Flash.”

Iris never, _neve_ _r_ calls the Barry they share _Flash_. She’s insistent on it. Her way of keeping them distinct in her heart, of keeping the speedster she’d first loved separate from the one she has now. On this Earth, only Eobard ever wears the yellow suit, chases down his scarlet-clad opponent and fucks him against a skyscraper in the middle of the public street, two blurs of lightning moving too fast for anyone to see. Iris has left that behind. Iris had buried her Flash in the rubble of her Earth, and her old self along with him. On this Earth she has Barry and Barry alone.

She doesn’t use her speed. She doesn’t let anyone call her _Eobard_. She accepts the name _Reverse_ , but only as part of a plural noun. She’s become Iris West, because Iris West has never loved anyone before Barry Allen. Iris West carries no guilt. Iris West has no ghosts.

“This is a tempest in a teapot,” Eobard says, with what little gentleness he’s capable of. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Those who are shouting are shouting because there’s nothing else they can do to enforce their disapproval - there are no laws they can levy against us, and they certainly have no individual power to harm any of us.”

“They’ve _already_ harmed Barry.” Iris sits up. Her glass hits the table next to her with a thunk, not hard enough to break it, but hard enough to suggest she’d like to. “He’s awake. I can hear him crying.”

“He wants to cry alone for a while,” Eobard says. “He won’t thank us for intruding.”

“He shouldn’t cry at all.” Iris looks at Eobard for the first time since he’d brought her the scotch. “I’m not sure his tears aren’t enough for me to put my hand through some chests.”

“If you do that he’ll only cry more.” Eobard looks at her, too. “What do you really want? Revenge? Or to make Barry smile again?”

“You know which,” Iris says fiercely.

* * *

The problem is, it takes time. And time, Eobard is starting to worry, is something they don’t have.

Barry’s put on paid leave from the CCPD – just until the scandal dies down, Singh says. The captain is on their side, in action as well as deed, throwing intrusive photojournalists into the drunk tank and hanging up on anyone who isn’t calling about actual police work. But the optics are the optics, as Singh knows too well; Eobard can’t begrudge the man his caution, not when it comes from the hard-earned experience of being the first openly gay senior officer on the CCPD. Not when Eobard himself is working so hard to manage those very same optics.

The problem _is_ , being on leave leaves Barry with too much time to mope. Iris suggests Barry join one of them at their offices, but Eobard doesn’t have to open his mouth for Barry to know that’s a bad idea. An office full of reporters would be a shark tank for Barry, right now. And while ordinarily Barry enjoys spending the odd day at STAR Labs – he’s friends with a number of the bright young scientists in his age group, including the gregarious Dr. Ramon – bringing Barry into STAR Labs now would just lead to another slew of articles about Eobard flaunting his boytoy around. Pictures of them in Eobard’s office with salacious captions about afternoon delight. Anonymous quotes from the discontented – and despite how hard Eobard works to make STAR Labs a positive environment, there are always some: _of course Dr. Wells has a thing for young boys. Just look at the coterie he surrounds himself with. You think Ramon got his position based on his scientific abilities? Rathaway? Raymond?_

Then Barry would blame himself for tarring his friends with the same brush, and the cycle would only worsen.

The first few days, Barry runs. A lot. One night he brings home crepes for dinner, warm and soft and fresh from Paris, and even manages to smile and make a joke about what a fine little housewife he makes. For dessert, Iris brings out the corset, and Barry goes warm and liquid like the chocolate croissants they’ll reheat in the oven the next morning. Eobard and Iris take turns feeding them to Barry, and the way Barry licks chocolate off their fingers makes it seem as if nothing could possibly go wrong, not when the three of them are together.

But then Eobard leaves the house, and Iris leaves the house, and Barry is left alone for the second day in a row, and when they come home that day nothing is right at all.

They start snatching time out of their day to run home, alternating schedules, all of it coordinated via electronic calendars and Gideon as the world’s most advanced personal assistant. A five-minute bathroom break can be a half hour of skin-to-skin caresses, in the speed force. Iris fakes an interview across town and brings Barry lunch, watching anxiously to make sure he’s eating. Eobard spends a thirty-minute conference call on mute with Barry under one arm, breathing deeply while Eobard strokes his hair over and over and murmurs the same nonsense syllables on an infinite, repetitive loop.

Towards the end of the first week, Barry whispers, in bed between his Reverses when the lights are turned down: “I feel like everything’s falling apart.”

He doesn’t say anything more, not then. He just clings and parts his lips and parts his legs and pulls Eobard and Iris down into him, as he always has, an endless sucking well of gravity that somehow the rest of the world can’t sense. Eobard has always felt that gravity, drawn to Barry helplessly across miles and centuries. But it’s never felt this desperate before.

Later, after Barry has begged and Iris has obliged and Eobard has dried his tears, Barry says more.

“I thought I had the perfect life,” he says. “I fought so hard for it, forgave so much, stretched myself pushed myself gave and learned to take and it was so hard, but it was worth it, because it meant I could have this, I could let myself have this. And now I’m losing it.”

“You’re not losing it,” Iris says fiercely. “We won’t let you use it. We’re working on it. Just wait a little longer, Barry. You can do that for us, can’t you?”

“I started to think I could keep this,” Barry whispers. “That I’d be allowed to keep it.”

“Allowed has nothing to do with it. We won’t allow it to be any other way. Do you hear me?”

“I always worried I might lose it to an enemy,” Barry goes on, as if he hasn’t heard. His head is pillowed against Iris’ shoulder; Eobard is on his side, one arm thrown across Barry’s chest, hovering protectively. Barry could easily look at either of his Reverses, but he’s staring up at the ceiling, and it doesn’t seem like he’s really seeing it, either. “Alien invasion, metahuman with a grudge, breacher… you name it, we’ve fought it. But the media?” Barry stops talking for a second, gasps like he might be about to cry, but then he goes on. “It doesn’t have anything to do with being a superhero, with me being the Flash… they don’t want me dead, they don’t want dominion over Central City or Earth, they don’t want personal vengeance. It’s just a bunch of people who _don’t like who I’m sleeping with._ ” Now he’s crying. “That’s what’s going to destroy everything? It can be that _petty_? The ruin of everything, that _meaningless_?”

“It won’t destroy everything,” Iris says. “It _can’t_.”

“This isn’t someone you can punch,” Barry says helplessly. “This isn’t someone we can fight.”

“It’s a different fight than you’re used to, but still one we can handle,” Eobard says firmly. “And even if we lose it – Barry, you’re not going to lose _us_. Worst case scenario, we pick up and move. All of us. The three of us, together.”

“Where could we go?” Barry whispers. “If we were all nobodies – but you’re _Harrison Wells_.”

“The twenty-second century is nice this time of year.”

Barry goes still. His eyes focus abruptly on Eobard’s. “The future,” he says wonderingly.

Eobard dares to kiss him. “I know you’d prefer to stay here,” he says. “I know that all time periods aren’t the same to you.”

“You’d miss your family,” Iris says. “Your friends.”

“But even the worst case, the _absolute_ worst case, doesn’t have us leaving you. We’ll never leave you. We’ll go somewhere else in time, when the minor scandal of a relationship with three people has been forgotten as it deserves, and simply start over.”

“Thank you,” Barry says on a gasp, “ _thank you_ – ”

This time Iris kisses him. Eobard puts his arms around them both, and doesn’t mention that Iris’ eyes are wet, too.

Later, when Barry is asleep, Iris looks over at Eobard. “We’ll move if we have to,” she says, “but I don’t like the idea of cutting and running, and I don’t think you do, either.”

Eobard smooths Barry’s hair down; Barry tosses slightly in his sleep, pressing closer to Eobard’s touch. “Our Barry values family very highly,” Eobard says. “We’re the most important people in his life, but he’d be sad if he had to leave, say, Joe West behind.”

“He’s lost enough people already.”

“Exactly.”

Iris’ gaze flickers. “You sound as if you have something in mind.”

“As a matter of fact,” Eobard says, “I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, there's going to be more. Yes, it will be up on Friday. Yes, you should definitely scream at me in the comment boxes about what a terrible person I am :D


End file.
